A Brave New World of multiparty politics?
What the Clacton by-election means for the rest of us.
Post election blues (or purples)
In the small hours of the morning it was confirmed that Douglas Carswell was the first MP elected for UKIP. After over a decade of performing well at European Parliamentary elections, UKIP now have electoral success at Westminster.
There is a history of the two major parties losing by-elections to candidates outside the mainstream (think George Galloway) but the last time an incumbent MP triggered a by-election after defecting was Bruce Douglas-Mann in 1982, and it didn’t end well for him.
Douglas Carswell not only won, but convincingly so, just shy of 60% of the vote. Whether it was his personal popularity in the constituency, or a surge in the UKIP vote, remains to be seen. One interesting detail is that UKIP didn’t stand a candidate against Carswell in Clacton in 2010, meaning there were no previous electoral figures to compare UKIPs performance with.
While Carswell re-election was not a shock to anyone, UKIPs performance in Heywood and Middleton, trailing only 2 percentage points behind Labour, indicated a greater trend in UKIPs appeal beyond the coastal areas where they have traditionally done well.
Heywood and Middleton was supposed to be a safe Labour seat, and increasingly their vote less than 1% over their poor performance in the 2010 general election was seen as troubling, but not a complete disaster.
Moving Forward
With their current polling could UKIP conceivably become a leading force in British politics? Unlikely.
The way our electoral system works means that the national polling never corresponds directly to the number of seats in the commons. The FPTP system rewards parties who have built up support in key constituencies over a number of years. At the moment UKIP just don’t have the history behind them.
That being said, if UKIP come away from the next election with less than a dozen seats I think they’ll be sorely disappointed.
The real question for the next election will be if they displace the Lib Dems long held third place. The Lib Dems (and their predecessors) haven’t finished lower than third in terms of MPs in the Commons since the 1950s.
I predict the Lib Dems will still be third in terms of MPs, but with a vastly reduced number. Perhaps even as low as the 20s. This could mean that the real headache in the rise of UKIP won’t be for Labour or the Conservatives, but maybe for the Lib Dems.
If they come fourth in terms of votes, behind UKIP, but are still the king-makers in a hung parliament — not an unrealistic proposition — how will they justify that to the population? With a vast swathe of their protest vote come to UKIP will they ever be able to recover as a party?
While it is true that a large proportion of UKIPs vote comes from disaffected Tories, they are also picking by a significant number of people who didn’t vote in previous elections.
After his historic victory, Douglas Carswell said that all he wanted was “a quiet cup of tea and then bed”. Will Carswell’s ‘cup of tea’ replace the Farage ‘pint of beer’?
Will Carswell usher in a new era for UKIP, or a new era for British politics? Only time will tell. The real test will be the 2015 general election — an entirely different beast from a by-election.
Remember the old adage in vino veritas, or as Nigel Farage might say: In cervisia veritas.
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Photo credits:
Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons
